Mattie Mitchell

by Gary Collins

  Mattie Mitchell had witnessed that operation from a distance as an eager young trapper in his twenties. He had seen the same place drilled again in 1895, when the Newfoundland government discovered oil there. This venture too was plagued with problems, not the least of which was a financial one, and this latest operation failed, too.

  Mattie Mitchell and Hugh Cole left the dilapidated shack in the morning without breakfasting and walked the five or so miles to the settlement of Parson’s Pond. They arrived at 6: 30 a.m. and were welcomed into one of the friendly homes, where they enjoyed a hearty breakfast they did not have to cook for themselves. After the meal they purchased supplies and headed back into the mountains with loaded packs.

  And on April 15, Mattie Mitchell, in full stride and wearing torn snowshoes, came down out of the mountains leading the curious reindeer and the human troop behind him. Part of the way brought them to a very steep place and the deer snorted their obvious dislike, but the barking dogs and the yelling humans would not allow them to turn back. The stag that had been crippled by the dog was still lame and the rocky decline caused the animal much misery, so Cole ordered the reindeer loaded on one of the sleds, where it was tied securely and rode in style, like the Lapland women, down the south side of Parson’s Pond.

  Snow started again, and with the strong winds whistling in from the gulf bringing its Arctic chill to the land, Mattie led them through sheltered leads among stunted tuckamore. Here the reindeer found the food to their liking and the company had to drive them from the flora constantly. They swam the reindeer across St. Paul’s inlet, where the animals seemed to enjoy the short swim and kept rubbing their bodies against the dories the humans were paddling, as if playfully hoping to dislodge their handlers into the water.

  Just as dark came on the evening of April 8, Mattie’s wife, Mary Anne, heard a commotion outside her door. Stepping outside she saw racing, barking dogs and yelling children, several men, and two younger women all hurrying along the snowy path that ran by her door into the hills. A distant barking from the green hills joined the village din and the echo of the excited dogs resounded around the quiet evening cove at Norris Point in Bonne Bay. Then Mary saw her tall husband come walking at the head of a bobbing bunch of animals, with the lowering shadow of darkness settling upon his broad shoulders. And that night Mattie slept under his roof and held in his arms the woman that he loved.

  ALLOWING LITTLE TIME FOR REST, Cole got Mattie to take him to Deer Lake by a fresh dog team the next day. They arrived at the rail terminal at 6: 30 a.m., in time to smell the fumes of the eastbound way-freight’s struggling engine.

  Mitchell returned alone to the herd in Bonne Bay the next day. The ice in the east arm of the bay was starting to break up and was unsafe for the reindeer to travel across, so Mattie led the group along an alternate route that he had walked thousands of times: around the northernmost end of the east arm to Deer Lake, where the reindeer browsed beneath the magnificent looming mountains on a land that Mattie himself owned. He led them down through the valleys and up over the mountain passes. They crossed the rising Lomond River at a steady, shallow spot that he knew of and headed southwest to Deer Lake. The lame stag was unable to walk, so they strapped it to a sled again and released it only at night to feed.

  On April 24, the expedition arrived at the logging town of Deer Lake, where they were met by a well-rested Hugh Cole. Sundine, the Sami herder Aslic, and his wife and their daughter, Maretta, who stared in amazement at the first whistle-blowing locomotive she had ever seen, boarded the train at the railhead. Cole ordered four of the reindeer stags, two of which had suffered injuries on that last talus slope coming into Parson’s Pond, and two which simply appeared to be “played out,” loaded into one of the covered freight cars for the run east to Millertown. The other Lapland herder, Pere, Aslic’s son, who had developed a friendship with Mattie, stayed with Mattie Mitchell and Greening to drive the herd to Millertown. All of the accumulated baggage from their trip south, including the komatiks and the dogs, were also loaded aboard the train. Cole left the three men one small dog and enough grub to last for two days before he departed with his entourage on the train, first class, for Millertown.

  The trio set off on the last leg of their historic trek. The reindeer followed Mattie without encouragement. The lone dog trailed behind them silently with its tongue out. They travelled with relative ease along the railbed in the disappearing wake of the train. They left it where it crossed Kitty’s Brook, well inland on the south side of Sandy Lake.

  South and east for the next five days, Mattie led the party on the familiar way along the general course of the brook, which they crossed out of necessity several times as they went. Past the Gaff and Main and the Fore Mast in the distance, they walked and crossed south of the Mizzen Mast. Here, in the very heart of this island nation, the influence of the sea that surrounded it persisted. European explorers had given the rocky promontories that stood above this plateau the names of a fully-rigged sailing vessel, and by doing so the geological formations lost their age-old Indian ones. The four outcrops rose up out of the barren, windy landscape, like the permanently frozen pingos of the Arctic coast, and had always been used to guide the Indian people along their way.

  This was a place Mattie knew well. He had hunted caribou here many times and had once led an American sportsman there to take a trophy stag with more than forty points. As he passed through the area, Mattie remembered the headless deer he had left on the barrens of the Topsails that day. The American refused to take any of the meat, and Mattie, who had to carry on his back the weighted, spreading antlers, was able to take only a few choice cuts from the carcass. He also remembered the Yankee sport taking the biggest, juiciest of the steaks out of the iron frying pan as soon as Mattie had cooked them by their campfire that night. He wished he had his pack filled with some of that meat now.

  Down and away from the drifting Topsail barrens they made their difficult way to the thick, wooded valley where the Hines River rushed east toward the huge Red Indian Lake. He set rabbit snares every night in the alder beds and every morning he was rewarded with a brace and sometimes more of the tasty animals, which the three of them ate gratefully. Late one evening he crept up behind a beaver lodge. The big rodent was swimming back and forth in the small channel of water that opened beside its “pantry.” He recognized it as a male and, knowing the female would care for the kits that were almost certainly inside the lodge, he killed the animal with one clean shot. That night the three men feasted on roasted beaver meat and, in the morning, with their bellies filled for the first time in days, they crossed the Buchans River and stood on the northern bank of the windy Red Indian Lake.

  On April 30, Mattie strode into the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company’s camp on the banks of the Mary March River three miles northwest of Millertown. He and his group had walked 400 hard miles in twenty-six days and accomplished what many considered impossible to do in the dead of winter.

  Behind him, with their flaring nostrils catching the scent of the four stags corralled nearby, the reindeer from Lapland waited until Mattie Mitchell stood aside, and then pranced the last few yards to the fence, where they poked their curious noses between the round, unpeeled pickets. Mattie had delivered to Millertown thirty-eight does and ten stags, all of them a bit leaner than when they had left St. Anthony.

  Two of the animals had wandered off somewhere around the Parson’s Pond area and enjoyed the local caribou’s hospitality so much they never returned. It was reported that following autumn that a hunter from the area had in his sights a caribou that didn’t look quite like any of the others he had killed. He killed it anyway.

  Mattie Mitchell had carried out an incredible feat. He had led the expedition through what was, without doubt, the worst terrain in the country. He had achieved a feat as great as Daniel Boone, who had led another party through the Cumberland Gap of these same southern Appalachian mountains, only in Kentucky, forever changing the population of the great
plains of America.

  Unfortunately, the great reindeer drive was all in vain for the pulp and paper company. The deer didn’t work out as suitable beasts of burden and were eventually sent back to Dr. Grenfell’s Mission in St. Anthony. This time the reindeer didn’t have to walk back over the peninsula but were shipped back in luxury— at no cost to the good doctor.

  CHAPTER 16

  MATTIE WAS NOW A GISIGU—AN OLD MAN.

  One evening when he was returning home, his acute hearing detected a faint rustling sound coming from the alder beds near the gravel road ahead of him. He stopped and listened, but the evening had grown silent. A rabbit rustling through the falling autumn leaves, he figured, and he moved on. The sound came again and from the same place. Again he stopped and listened, but again no sound came. Curious now, he stepped forward. The noise repeated as before. Something was close to the ground and moved only when he did, as if hoping his walking would disguise its own movement. Mattie crept toward the brush where the sound had come from, leaned down, pulled some of the branches apart, and looked inside.

  At first he saw nothing. Then the faint sound came again, very close, and at that instant he saw the owl. It was a little saw-whet no more then eight inches long. It was entangled among the thick alders, and when it saw Mattie it stood absolutely still and stared at him, its bright yellow-orange eyes with their huge black centres staring without blinking. The ground was covered with the hapless owl’s feathers. Mattie could see it was injured but wondered why it hadn’t just walked away. Then he saw the wire snare around its leg. The owl had been following along a rabbit lead and had become snared. With its frantic efforts to break the wire, it had damaged its wing against the tangled trees.

  Pushing the trees aside to allow him room, Mattie bent down. With a soft crooning sound in his ancient language, he approached the bird, which now cowered close to the ground with its big, limpid eyes fixed on the Indian. He pulled the snare stick, which had been driven into the soil, free with one hand and held the shivering bird to the ground with the other. Mattie twisted the wire loose from the snare stick and reached to free it from the leg of the bird. He felt the blood-matted feathers. In its struggles to free itself, the owl had embedded the thin wire into its flesh all the way to the leg bone.

  The bird was in terrible pain, but while Mattie gently removed the bloody wire, it made no sound and didn’t move a feather. When the bird was free from its fetter it tried to stand, but fell back to the ground again. It looked up at Mattie pitifully. The owl could neither walk or fly. Mattie picked up the bird, which weighed a mere six or seven ounces, cradled it in the crook of his arm, and carried it home.

  He coated the torn leg all around with the sticky myrrh from a spruce tree. He pounded the thin inner white bark from a young aspen tree into a pulp and, stirring more of the spruce gum into the paste, he encased the wounded leg in the natural bandage. The fragile wing was more difficult to treat. Fortunately for the owl, the wing bone wasn’t broken, only battered and severely bruised. More than half of the wing’s long, white-tipped outer flight feathers were bent and useless.

  Early the next morning, Mattie walked down to the landwash and brought back several small, greenish kelp bladders. He popped each one of them, saving the glistening drop of salt water they contained, then ground the kelp petals into a medicinal paste as he had done with the aspen bark. He smeared the medicine over as much of the bruised wing as he could. And while Mattie administered his gentle healing, the bird neither moved or uttered sound.

  Hoping the bird would not flap the wing too much, he placed it inside a small, uncovered pen. The owl didn’t try to fly out of the pen until many days later, when its wing had healed under Mattie’s frequent doctoring. During that time Mattie caught meadow voles and mice and sometimes frogs for the bird, which ate whatever Mattie brought it.

  Early one morning, when Mattie went outside, the bird was gone. Mattie was very pleased. His healing had worked. Then he looked up and saw, perched in a nearby tree, the owl staring down at him. He left his garden and went walking along the road. Hearing the flutter of wings behind him, he turned and saw the owl following him, flying from tree to tree and sometimes landing on rooftops and fences along the roadside. Its wingspan made it look much bigger in flight.

  The bird soon became known as Mattie’s owl—or that tall Indian’s owl, depending on who you talked to. Everyone was amazed to see it follow him whenever he moved from his house, day or night. One of the Mi’kmaq words for owl is gu’gu’gwes. Mattie called the bird Gu’gu, but only among his own people. To others in the community he did not use the Mi’kmaq word for the bird, but called it “little nightbird.”

  The owl would follow no one else, not even when they tried to get it to do so. From the first morning when Mattie had seen the owl perched in the low branches of the tree, he had stopped bringing it food. But still, each morning when Mattie stepped from his door, Gu’gu was waiting in the same tree. When Mattie left the yard, the bird always followed.

  The day came when Mattie was not able to rise from his bed. He was dying and he knew it. Even his indomitable will was finally defeated by the state of near-death. From Marie Mitchell Sparkes’s journal:

  My Grandfather had been ailing for a while, but on this particular day, he asked my father to go and bring him the priest so that he could receive the last rites of the church. And as he had been a devoutful Catholic, it was his last wish to have a priest present in his final hours. Back in those days the nearest priest lived in the Scared Heart parish in Curling which was a few miles south of Corner Brook. And since there were very few cars around the area, the more frequent type of travel then was by boat. So my father got in his Dory and rowed the few miles to Curling and returned with the priest, who administered the Last Rites to my grandfather.

  Later that night pop sat in the room by his father’s bed with the holy candles lit and slowly flickering, sending their light around the room.

  My grandfather was awake and fully aware that it was his time to leave his earthly existence, he looked at my father and said “Johnny, I am going to sleep now” and with a sigh he closed his eyes for one final time.

  And when Mattie Mitchell’s body was carried from his home in the glorious autumn of 1921, Gu’gu, Mattie’s “little nightbird,” followed the slow procession as it made its way to the hill where Newfoundland’s greatest frontiersman would forever rest. It was Indian summer, the time of year when hunters are mysteriously lured afield. And the Mitchell family laid their hunter down.

  The gentle man who had contributed so much to the exploration and development of his beloved island home was buried on a hill in the west coast city of Corner Brook. Below him, the bay that he loved so much was calm and reverential in the still evening air. The mountain valleys were deep in shadow. But the lofty mountaintops were tinged with the soft reds and purples that only come in the autumn time.

  And as the cool night came down out of the hills, a new yellow moon appeared and, as it had on that long-ago night on the beach with the American adventurer, had the old one in its arms.

  The mound of dark new earth looked even darker in the shadows. And from somewhere very near, a lone owl sounded its skiew of requiem and flew silently away before the day came, and never returned.

  EPILOGUE

  BRIAN SPARKES HAD AN UNEXPECTED and unexplained encounter with his great-grandfather, one that shocked and affected him for a long time afterward.

  Brian grew up listening to tales of his famous grandfather. Like his mother, Marie, he never tired of hearing them. She passed down most of these stories to him. He always secretly wished he could have met Mattie. He always wondered what he would say to him if given the chance. Brian never figured that one day he would tell his great-grandfather to leave and never return!

  It was the autumn of 2005 and Brian Sparkes was forty years old. It was his favourite time of the year. The treed streets of the city of Corner Brook where he lived were resplendent with brilliant fa
ll colours and the entire Humber Valley was dressed in autumn splendour. The days were short and the nights were cold and filled with glittering stars. Brian went to work as he always did. He was an appliance repairman and good at his work. It was just another day. But this night would be anything but ordinary.

  When he went to bed that night, he was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. That was the strangest thing, and the only thing he remembered the next day. He remembered he hadn’t been sleepy at all. He had decided he would read for a while, though he wasn’t much of a reader. Brian was reaching for a book when he suddenly changed his mind and turned out his reading light. He had no memory of falling asleep. That time between consciousness and slumber wasn’t there. He had no idea how he knew, but he did know he was dreaming. Even in his dreaming state he knew he was dreaming.

  He was staring down at the tall body of Mattie Mitchell, who was in a coffin of clear glass. His great-grandfather’s face looked just like the photos his family had of him. His clothing did not. Mattie was wearing a grey uniform with stripes. Brian could not figure out the style. It didn’t look like the uniform of a soldier. Mattie had never been a soldier. He wore no hat. His long hair was as black as a rainy night sky. On his feet he wore the long, leather, laced-up leggings evident in some of his pictures. The boots nearly came up to his knees. The coffin’s lid was closed, but Mattie’s eyes were not.

  No matter how Brian turned, the eyes of his great-grandfather followed him. For several minutes Brian stood above the glass coffin, unable to escape the stare of the corpse that lay within.

  Without closing his eyes or speaking one word, Mattie, with the glass coffin, suddenly floated out of sight, down a magnificent green river that flowed through a valley of golden colours. Brian cried and cried for his great-grandfather to come back. But the glass coffin, glistening with light, disappeared around a bend in the river. The valley turned green, the water turned black, and Brian awakened bathed in sweat and tears.